


Glints in the Night

by petpluto



Category: Veronica Mars (Movie 2014), Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, POV Female Character, Romance, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-02-22 22:26:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2523938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petpluto/pseuds/petpluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Veronica reflects on 'epic' the summer after, and then 10 years down the road.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glints in the Night

**Author's Note:**

> This is a [vmficrecs prompt](http://vmficrecs.tumblr.com/post/98907011500/october-veronica-mars-fic-prompts), and thank god for it.
> 
> Nothing in this story belongs to me.

It’s there, niggling at the back of her head, on constant loop. Like her brain has turned into the world’s worst turntable. And she knows a thing or two about bad turntables, after the debacle of her father’s Blue Oyster Cult record getting scratched and perpetually stuck on “-living for giving the devil his - living for giving the devil his-”. Over and over, until her father finally gave up on it and bought himself the CD.

It’s there, when they’re making out. When he calls her. When they’re walking the boardwalk.

It’s there, over and over again. “I thought our story was epic. I thought our story was epic. I thought our story was epic.”

And, every single time, visions of the morning after. “Our story was epic - Last night was kind of a blur - Our story was epic - Is that our room service?”

She hates it. Hates the repeat, hates the constant revulsion swirling in her gut. Hates the fact that she’s hurried Logan off the phone, out of her room, out of the apartment, when the constant roiling words get too loud and too hard to handle.

She likes it best when it’s barely there at all, when the visions of Kendall are soft and blurry and can be blotted out completely by Logan’s affections. Logan’s attention. But even that has started to make her more than vaguely irritable, and it was too much to hope that Logan wouldn’t notice. And even more foolish to think he wouldn’t push.

He is, after all, the guy who showed up on her porch after she blatantly ignored him and asked what he could do to make it better.

It happens during a particularly brutal loop, one where she is immersed in everything she felt that day during her return trip on the elevator. Tight chest, burning eyes, clenched jaw. And she snaps at him during Easy Rider, because of course they’re watching Easy Rider and of course he’s looking to make out with her during it.

But she’s in that suite, after riding in that elevator. And she’s being ridiculous, she knows it. And if she could just pay someone to replace these fragments of that night and its awful morning with a jumble of Blue Oyster Cult lyrics, she would. But she can’t. So she just pushes him away and reaches for her bag.

“Veronica,” Logan exhales, “what is up with you?”

She shrugs, all shoulders. Tight lips. “Nothing. I need to get home, so.”

“Just a half an hour ago, you had time for a movie,” he counters, sliding off the couch and angling toward her. Stops. “Can you talk to me? Tell me what I did? What I didn’t do?”

“What makes you think this is even about you?” she asks, clipping each word, and his eyebrows furrow.

“I don’t know, maybe because one second you’re here, with me, and looking like you enjoy it, and the next you’re running for the door like I killed your -” They both flinch, and Logan sighs. “Go, if you want to. But if you don’t want to do this, I just - I need to know, Veronica. I can’t spend the summer chasing after you.”

She leaves, spine ramrod straight and head forward.

Later, when the revolutions have slowed, when the words are more murmurs than anything, she calls him. Doesn’t apologize, doesn’t address it. But she calls him, twisting her hair around her finger and imagines him doing it. Calls him and makes plans for the next day, hoping it will be enough to keep him chasing her.

~~~

She wakes in a borrowed bed and blinks against the light, snuggles further into him. His warmth, his smell. He chuckles, sleepy and low, and it’s enough to make her open her eyes fully. It’s enough to make her sit up.

“What?” she groans. “What could possibly be funny right now?”

Logan shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s stupid.”

Veronica rests her chin on his shoulder, lets her hair fall over their faces. Curtains them from the world, she thinks. “It’s not stupid. I want to know.”

He shrugs and snuggles closer. Her curtain of hair shimmers in the light. “I keep falling asleep every night expecting this to be just a long, weird dream.” He tangles his fingers in her hair. “Remember that short story we read? It’s the Civil War and the guy gets caught and he’s about to be hanged and the rope breaks? He makes it home. And then his neck snaps. That’s what this feels like. The moment before the rope recoils.”

She grins. “You were always one for the macabre. And the dramatic.”

“I resent that.” He rolls them over. “I’m known for my sediteness.”

“That’s right - that’s who you are. You’re not the kind of guy to tell a girl their love will span years and continents,” she jokes.

He stills above her. “What’d you say?”

“It’s not what I said,” she enunciates. “That was all you, buddy. ‘Years and continents,’” she intones. “‘EPIC’.”

“The anti prom,” he says, like it’s a dawning realization. “I said we were epic, and you ran away, and I drank to drown out the rest of my sorrows.”

“Yeah, I’m really seeing your lack of embellishment.” 

“Shut up,” he whispers and kisses her nose, slides next to her. “I practiced and practiced that whole bit. I had planned on asking you out to a nice dinner after graduation. Taking you out, doing it right. Driving you out to that beach we all went to for Homecoming Sophomore year. And then just putting it out there. Laying all my cards out on the table.”

She nestles in beside him. “What happened?”

“You did,” he laughs, waves away her protestations. “You, with your ‘I’m not going to ever talk to you again’, and I remember standing there thinking - just shit. And then I panicked.”

“And gave me your speech -”

“- A more pathetic, more maudlin version of my speech, yes -”

“- And I booked it out of there, and you called Kendall…”

“And got the worst hangover for it. Plus, a tiny blonde girl showing up the next morning to pound on my door and then looking at me like she was prepared to skin me alive,” Logan says. “Yeah.”

She kisses him, softly. “I wasn’t going to skin you. That would have been way too messy.”

He laughs, long and low. “Really?”

“Yeah. I was always more into a different kind of justice.”

“Car cubing.”

“As one option, yeah.”

He stretches beside her. wraps an arm around her waist. “Overly theatrical or not, I’d say I was on the money with my assessment.”

“Oh, do you?” She smiles coyly at him. “How so?”

“Years - self explanatory. Continents - you were across the entire continent for a while, and I was on a few others. What else?”

“Ruin lives,” she supplies. “Blood shed.”

The smile he grants her spreads slowly across his face, and she can’t help but mirror it. “I can’t help but feel that’s also fairly self explanatory.”

“How the part about songs?”

“What?”

“You said something about people writing songs about the difficult love stories,” she offers. “And I don’t think anyone’s written a song about us yet.”

“Give me time,” he promises, sliding closer, pressing every inch against her. “I’ll learn an instrument, write you a song. You remember a lot of this speech.”

“How could I not?” She shrugs. “It was surreal. And for a little bit, it felt like I’d missed my moment. Even after, when we did get together, I was, like, hyperfocused on it.”

“You never said anything.”

She sighs, and slides a leg through his. “You know, I was always trying to avoid fighting with you.” Kicks him in the shin when he snorts. “I was! I would be worried about something, or just mad - and I’d avoid the hell out of you because I wouldn’t want to have that fight.”

He stills, and she shifts a little away from him. “What fight?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she tells him. “We’re over it. We’re here and past it, and we’re different people now.”

“Sure,” he answers, sitting up. “We’re different people. And one of the ways we’re different is the fact that we talk to each other.”

She shrugs him off, rolls a little farther away. Crosses her arms low, and breathes out and back in again. Logan’s patience radiates off of him, and she breathes that in. “The fight where you’d tell me you were lying. That we weren’t anything special. The fight where you’d just - walk away.”

He reaches over and wipes away an errant tear. “Nineteen year old you was dumb.”

She laughs. “Yeah, well, eighteen year old you thought boozing it up and dropping an epic love speech was a great plan of attack, so I don’t want to hear it.”

“Eighteen year old me was very, very dumb,” he agrees, dipping his head to meet hers. “But he was right about one thing.”

She captures his lips, and then leans back into the pillows. “Yeah?”

He grins, presses light kisses to her face. “We’re epic, you and me.”

She basks in him, in this. In the completeness. “You know what? We are.”


End file.
